RUINS: PERFORMING QUEER HISTORY
Amy Adler, Ken Gonzales-Day, Cat Gunn, William E. Jones, Morgan Lieberman, Stephen Milner, Darian Newman, Matt Savitsky, and Joe Yorty
Curated by Nathan Storey
May 2 - June 13, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION on SATURDAY, MAY 2, 5 to 8pm
BEST PRACTICE is pleased to present RUINS: PERFORMING QUEER HISTORY, curated by Nathan Storey. RUINS is an iterative exhibition of interdisciplinary artists reckoning with queer histories, archives, and loss within their own contemporary studio practices. The artists in RUINS unearth LGBTQ+ histories, search for the fragmentary pieces, and reimagine our queer constellations.
This second iteration of RUINS surveys intergenerational California-based artists whose works explore queer embodiment, intimacy, and space across drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and painting. The exhibition includes work by Amy Adler, Ken Gonzales-Day, Cat Gunn, William E. Jones, Morgan Lieberman, Stephen Milner, Darian Newman, Matt Savitsky, and Joe Yorty
Archives are alive, pulsing with history, memory, and ruin. Simultaneously, they are fragmentary, evoking a longing for a time and place you cannot name. Archives bridge the past, present, and future, symbolic of the inevitability of our time slipping away.
There is a current movement of queer artists looking backward and engaging with various queer archives or legacies within their contemporary studio practices. This deep preoccupation with the queer archive is, in part, due to the lingering and residual effects of the AIDS crisis, an utter catastrophe ignored and perpetuated by the United States government, leading to the loss of an entire generation—a crisis, which 45 years later, is still not yet over. The urgency of this archival engagement is now inflamed as the Trump Administration again attempts to erase and remove all traces of queer and gender expansive histories, which we know have always existed in any histories of America. The afterlife of ephemera becomes a tactic of resistance. To perform queer history, to grapple with our collective pasts, allows us to look toward our queer futures.
Nathan Storey is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator based between Boulder, Colorado and Brooklyn, New York. His research traces the relationship between printed matter and queer desire, memory, and loss.
Storey’s work has been supported by Queer|Art, ICA San Diego, 80WSE New York, Candice Madey, Printed Matter, and galleries internationally. Storey’s work has been featured in MATTE Editions, The Brooklyn Rail, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and The New York Times. He has attended residencies and workshops at Cornell University, Ithaca; Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown; Anderson Ranch Art Center, Snowmass; and the Prattsville Art Center; Catskills.
Storey is the founder of SUBLIMATION, an artist-run space in New York (2018-2020), and UNDERTOW, Colorado’s first and only queer print press (est. 2024). Storey is the curator of the iterative exhibition, RUINS: PERFORMING QUEER HISTORY. He holds a BFA from NYU and an MFA from UC San Diego, where he received the David Antin Prize. Storey has taught at UC San Diego, MSU Denver, Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design, and The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.
www.nathanstoreyarchive.com
@___nathans
www.undertoweditions.com
@undertow_editions
Amy Adler works across the disciplines of drawing, performance, photography, and film. Her practice explores media and process considering subjects that exist between paradigms and identities. Born and raised in New York City, Amy is a graduate of LaGuardia High School of Music and Art. She attended Cooper Union and went on to receive her MFA in art practice from UCLA and an MFA in film production from USC School of Cinematic Arts. She has had multiple international and national gallery and museum exhibitions including solo projects at MOCA Los Angeles, the Aspen Art Museum, the UCLA Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Her drawings, films and photographs are included in permanent collections worldwide. Amy’s work is featured in multiple publications including Art and Queer Culture (Phaidon 2019). Her short films have screened at international film festivals including Frameline, Outfest, and BFI Flare. Amy Adler is a recipient of a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship and participant of the 2024 Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab. She is Professor of Visual Art at UC San Diego where she has been teaching since 2004.
Ken Gonzales-Day is a Los Angeles based artist whose interdisciplinary practice considers the historical construction of race and the limits of representational systems ranging from lynching photographs to educational museum displays. His widely exhibited Erased Lynching series (ongoing), along with the publication of Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke University Press, 2006) transformed the understanding of racialized violence in the United States and raised awareness of the lynching of Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, and African-Americans in California, locating these collective acts of violence within the larger history of anti-immigration, white supremacy, and racial terror lynchings.
Works from the Profiled Series and the award winning PAC Prize publication Profiled (LACMA, 2011) have been exhibited internationally and grew out of his research into the history of educational displays on race, by drawing on the collections of over forty museums including, L'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Getty Museum and LACMA in LA, the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, and Washington D.C., the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (NPG), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), among others.
Gonzales-Day received his MFA in art from UC Irvine; his MA in art history from Hunter College, C.U.N.Y.; and was a Van Leer Fellow at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (ISP). Other fellowships include: the Getty Research Institute (GRI), The Smithsonian SAAM fellowship in American Art, and the Smithsonian Artist Fellowship (SARF); He was a Senior Fellow at The Terra Foundation in Giverny, France; The Rockefeller Foundation Center in Bellagio, Italy, and Gonzales-Day has received fellowships and awards from Art Matters, The Avery Foundation, California Community Foundation, Creative Capital, L.A.s' COLA Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography. His work is in the permanent collection of The Getty; LACMA; MOCA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; MoMA, NYC; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery; Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Gallery of Art, among others.
www.kengonzalesday.com
@kengonzalesday
Originally from Baltimore, Cat Gunn is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans imagemaking, installation, sculpture, ceramics, painting, and drawing. Using deconstructed altars, archival sites, and domestic spaces as a site of investigation, Gunn stages arrangements of ceramic sculptures, images, plants, found objects, and material experiments. These works interrogate how objects mediate relationships and memories. Working to honor their own Filipinx heritage they have reclaimed through their research, they also evaluate the colonial relationship and imperial impacts of the US occupation of the Philippines from 1898-1946. With the use of historical Filipino archives and a modest familial archive, their work offers a portal where divergent timelines can intersect, dreaming of what was, what could have been, and what will be.
Gunn received their MFA in Visual Arts from UC San Diego, where they expanded their practice into the realms of ceramics, sculpture, and installation. They received their MA in Professional Studies (Art History Concentration) and BFA in Painting from Towson University. Gunn has had their work included in recent group exhibitions at ICA in San Diego, Vielmetter in Los Angeles, and BEST PRACTICE in San Diego among others. Gunn also co-founded Harvest & Gather, an experimental, nomadic curatorial project run in San Diego with collaborator and friend, mika Castañeda.
www.catgunn.com
@mango__hot__sauce
William E. Jones is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. In recent years, he has exhibited paintings.
Jones has made the experimental films Massillon (1991) and Finished (1997); videos including The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998), Shoot Don't Shoot (2012) and Psychic Driving(2014); the documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004); and many other works, including the essay film Fall into Ruin (2017), about the Greek art dealer Alexander Iolas (1907-1987) and his abandoned house in Athens.
Jones’s films have been the subject of retrospectives at Tate Modern, London (2005); Anthology Film Archives, New York (2010); Austrian Film Museum, Vienna (2011); Oberhausen Short Film Festival (2011); and Queer Lisboa at the Cinemateca Portuguesa (2024). He participated in the 1993 and 2008 Whitney Biennials, the 2009 Venice Biennale, and the 2011 Istanbul Biennial. He has been exhibited at Musée du Louvre, Palais de Tokyo, and Cinémathèque française, Paris; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; St. Louis Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
William E. Jones has published the following non-fiction books: Is It Really So Strange? (2006); Tearoom (2008); Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration (2010); Halsted Plays Himself (2011); Between Artists: Thom Andersen and William E. Jones (2013); Imitation of Christ, a catalogue for the exhibition he curated at UCLA Hammer Museum in 2013; Flesh and the Cosmos(2014); and True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell (2016). He has also published the novels I'm Open to Anything (2019), I Should Have Known Better (2021) and I Didn't See It Coming (2023). Jones's writing has appeared in periodicals such as Animal Shelter, Area Sneaks, Artforum, Bidoun, Butt, Frieze, Little Joe, Mousse, Osmos, Tank, and The White Review.
Jones has received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer’s Grant, a Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant, a City of Los Angeles (COLA) Grant, and two California Community Foundation Fellowships.
William E. Jones is represented by David Kordansky Gallery and The Modern Institute.
Morgan Lieberman is a visual artist born and raised in Los Angeles. She is drawn to empathy driven narratives that include topics of identity, subculture, older generations, and disability.
Lieberman is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and currently on the MFA track at Cornell University in the Image Text Program.
She is based in Los Angeles and available for assignments and commissions worldwide.
www.morganliberman.com
@thechromaticsheep
Stephen Milner is an artist working in photography, sculpture, video, and installation. He received his MFA in Studio Art as a Graduate Teaching Fellow from the University of Oregon and his BFA in Photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Stephens work revolves around the representation of masculinity, identity and community through images, objects, fictional narratives and the human-altered landscape. He is currently based out of Palm Springs, CA.
www.stephenarthurmilner.com
@stephenmilner
Darian Newman is a designer, art director and educator with a focus in branding and editorial design. He is currently an MFA Candidate at the Rhode Island School of Design.
www.dariannewman.com
@bettyfordcenterofficial
Matt Savitsky, aka Minty (b. 1982), is a multidisciplinary performance artist who lives and works Los Angeles and whose often collaborative work combines performance, video, and sculptural installations.
Negotiating the physical, social, and ethical dimensions of relationships with collaborators is central to the staging and development of Savitsky’s projects. In group performances, he uses cameras and bodies to ask what it means to record the present moment. Although he uses many mediums, the central artistic act is that of collectively directing these creative sessions. Savitsky incorporates material play, theatrical props, and modular film sets that become important tools by which the group or partnership can express itself. He has explored these types of subject-object relations in projects involving BDSM roleplay, family members, performance collectives, and the queer arts community. In Mid-City Angels (2017), for example, he recontextualized poses from Greco-Roman sculptures within the tradition of queer performance, inviting Los Angeles-based collaborators to join him in remixing the Classical figure-support convention. In five hour-long, improvised sessions, Savitsky and his collaborators made and unmade sculptural forms, opening a dialogue about the relational and ongoing nature of identity construction.
www.mattsavitsky.com
@mintymedia
Joe Yorty is an interdisciplinary artist who employs a range of materials, objects, and methods to make work that largely addresses the anxieties and absurdities of American domestic culture. Including sculpture, collage, video, and photography his studio practice grapples with the stuff of thrift store refuse, last-minute estate sale deals, and the occasional dumpster dive to rub against the pathos of the ceaseless search for fulfillment in the accumulation of things that, to a large extent, defines the American experience in the 21st century. His work has been shown on both coasts of the United States and some places in between.
Joe was born in southwest Utah, raised in Southern California, served 11 years in the U.S. Navy, and received an MFA in Visual Art at UCSD in 2013. He currently lives and works in San Diego where he serves as the founding Creative Director for the non-profit gallery and project space BEST PRACTICE and the co-owner and operator of JOEHNS, a small neighborhood coffee shop.
UPCOMING
Cat Gunn & Mika Castañeda
July 11 - August 15, 2026
Noé Olivas
September 12 - October 17, 2026
Jertsin Crosby & Tara Merenda Nelson
curated by Joshua Tonies
November 14 - December 19, 2026
Ghost Agency (Anni Garza Lau + Gro Sarauw)
curated by Doreen Rios
February 13 - March 20, 2027
1955 Julian Avenue
San Diego, CA 92113
map
25th/Commercial on the Orange Line
Barrio Logan on the Blue Line
Gallery hours (during exhibitions):
Tuesday - Saturday
11am - 4pm